Gambling restriction list nears 21,000 as Estonia plans law review
The number of people with gambling addictions has grown in recent years, with nearly 21,000 people now on the self-imposed gambling restriction list. The Ministry of Finance plans to review the Gambling Act next year and update the details of how the restriction list is compiled.
Under the current plan, the changes could take effect in the middle of the year after next. The state collected €61 million in gambling taxes last year.
The number of people on the list has steadily increased over the past three years. In 2023, the list included 17,203 people.
One person may have restrictions on several types of games. Restrictions on games of chance now apply to 20,628 people, sports betting restrictions to 9,767 people, and lottery restrictions to 5,968 people. Sports betting restrictions have increased by 348 since the beginning of the year.
A person is added to the list indefinitely based on their own written application, and they must specify a period after which they may submit a new application to be removed from the list.
The period cannot be shorter than six months or longer than three years, said Jekaterina Nikitina, head of the excise department at the Tax and Customs Board.
"In our view, the fact that the number of people who have set restrictions for themselves has increased over the years shows that people are increasingly aware of the player protection mechanisms we have. These mechanisms work very well; otherwise, players would not use them," Nikitina said.
Under the Gambling Act, gambling operators must implement measures to ensure that people on the list cannot play the types of games they have restricted.
Rainer Osanik, head of the financial information policy department at the Ministry of Finance, said only isolated cases have occurred where companies failed to meet this requirement.
"Gambling operators comply with this requirement quite diligently. If a person is on the list and they are still allowed to play, the operator must refund the money the person lost. But the opposite also applies: if the person wins, they must return the winnings," Osanik said.
Next year, the Ministry of Finance plans to review the Gambling Act, including the rules for compiling the restriction list. Osanik said one problem is that a gambling addict often does not want to add themselves to the list.
"No one else can currently add them to the list, but family members of a gambling addict often suffer. The system should allow a person to be added to the list on certain additional grounds, either at the initiative of a family member or by court order. Estonian law does not currently allow this. We will now begin analyzing how this could be done," Osanik said.
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Editor: Aleksander Krjukov
